The hour badly spent

Wednesday afternoon Erica Hateley presented the colloquium "’It’s Not Just Cricket’: Sexual Colonization in Woody Allen’s Match Point and Someone Else’s Wimbledon." I decided to check it out because the flyer had the word "sexual" near Erica Hateley’s name.

Although she assured us this would be a "post-feminist rant," I wondered whether this would be delivered in saucy layman’s terms, or if instead we would be playing the poststructuralist drinking game. So I sat around for a few minutes and tried to get into the groove of whatever dialect she’s going with this afternoon.

4:06 PM "ideology founded on patriarchy."

4:08 PM "patriarchal heterosexuality." Okay, it’s gonna be one of those.

4:08 PM "psychology of patriarchal capitalist culture"

4:14 PM If Karin Friggin Westman wasn’t sitting right behind me I could just IM this right to all the English majors I know and THEY could play the drinking game along with me. What’s up with that? And why is Michael Donnelly over here too? The back row is for slackers and badasses.

4:15 PM ….

4:15 PM Oh.

4:16 PM "I’m looking at her skirt, not her arse." Tee hee!

4:16 PM "heteronormative patriarchy.”

4:17 PM "It takes a lot longer to find a picture of Anna Kournikova playing tennis than it does to find her…resting."

4:19 PM "destabilize the binary gendered logic of patriarchy"

4:19 PM "scopophilic patriarchy." Okay I FORFEIT the poststructuralist drinking game. Erica wins, because the patriarchy is oppressing us faster than I can type. At this point I decided to just listen, and only use my computer to google the big words.

4:20 PM Oh dear, look at the time! Erica never notices things like that.

4:21 PM There is a "been there done that" popular discourse of feminism internalized by female tennis players. Did I type that accurately?

4:23 PM "the sexualization of tennis-playing woman"

4:24 PM "containing women w/in acceptable patriarchal limits"

4:30 PM "body spectacle:" "pornography’s portrayal of orgasm." There’s something to google.

After she had thoroughly established that tennis is a tool of colonial and sexual repression, we started watching movies.

4:40 PM Heh, Erica said "Scarlett Yohansson."

I wasn’t sure how much I liked Match Point when I actually saw it, but Erica’s analysis pointed out that the film is aware of the colonial representations embedded in its characters, and partly because of that, the mood of the film prevents us from fully sympathizing with Chris Wilton. Uhh, I think that’s what she said. There were more big words too.

4:49 PM In Wimbledon: Why did we fast fwd through the part where Kirsten Dunst is nude? Wouldn’t it be possible to undermine my own internalized scopophilic patriarchal tendencies and make Kirsten Dunst’s ass a site of agency by normalizing her apodysophilia, or would this just reinforce them? Later on, after bumming one of Erica’s Marlboro’s, I felt a little guilty about joining the "I’ll eat out Luce Irigaray" Facebook group. Then I ate out Luce Irigaray.

4:54 PM "retroactive destabilization" what?

5:03 PM Time for questions. Why are these feminized, fetishized representations of America both blonde?

[Erica’s colloquium @Wordle.net]

Wednesday our somewhat-beloved Saucy Aussie will present "It’s Not Just Cricket: Sexual Colonization in the movies Wimbledon and Match Point deconstructed in a silly accent." Dr. Aussie promises to deliver a "post-feminist rant," and is terrified that the audience will jump down her throat afterwards, colonizing her in a decidedly unsexual way. As a fan of both sexual colonization and post-feminist rants, I think all of you should come by and listen! ECS 017 (I think) at 4 pm! Take the piss out of her by shouting "struth" when you can’t understand what she’s saying! Then throw an egg at her! Afterwards we can all go get drunk on SoCo or something.

The Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple arrived at Friday’s Visiting Writer lecture at four on the dot, right on time. The Dodd had already begun her introduction of memoirist Meredith Hall.

Hall explained, before reading, that she had lost a tooth on the plane on the way to Kansas. "It seems to me the only thing people can notice about me. I wanted to tell you that writers from Maine don’t always have teeth missing." Charming! The Olds have the best comic timing!

Hall was ostracized from her small New Hampshire town at age 16, when she got pregnant. Even her parents wouldn’t have her any more.

"It’s a powerful story about being a girl in a world where people don’t want you," said Susan Rodgers. Susan was the head of the creative writing program last year; she abruptly left K-State in August, after she and her husband got jobs at Oregon State Uni.

Hall read chapters from Without A Map, about the months after she was kicked out of her father’s house. She wandered around Europe, broke, stealing and selling shit to get by, relying on the kindness of strangers for the occasional place to crash. She met other families, other drifters, all sorts of people who didn’t speak English.

There was a real sense of disconnection between her and the people and places around her. This was partly due to the difficulty of communicating with people whose language she didn’t speak; much of the process consisted of pidgin sign language and heavy, rigorous observation, in addition to picking and choosing which truths she wants to reluctantly reveal depending on the person listening; but it was mostly because she was in exile. She was hugely depressed. She never missed a chance to remind us of that! It was like an eternally dissatisfied wine-taster, sampling and spitting out everything, all snap judgements and no intimacy. She was romanticizing her isolation. Five minutes into it, the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Blogger was getting bored. He started passing notes to the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Hipster.

Blogger: I hate memoirs. I will never, ever read one.

Hipster: Aww…I like them! I like this. You don’t at all do you?

Blogger: Is it that obvious?

Blogger: It’s starting to remind me of Huck Finn

Hipster: How?

Blogger:

1. i can’t quite figure out where she’s going with this.

2. this is almost exclusively her inner life - little interaction with the outside world except to observe it and move on. not quite like Huck, but it’s getting monotonous.

3. the present tense has NEVER EVER SOUNDED MORE ANNOYING to me

4. sorry; only 3 things

Hipster: haha i do agree that it is getting monotonous

Blogger: it’s a travel blog. It feels like IT MIGHT NEVER END

Hipster: yeah I know, and damn you for mentioning the present tense, because now that is bothering me

Ha ha, he’s sorry he ruined it for her, but he really wonders whether she expressed her guilt to him.

The book was originally a collection of autobiographical essays that had been printed individually in various trade publications. Publishers know how to market "memoirs" but they don’t know how to market "a collection of autobiographical essays." Hall didn’t know how to convert her "autobiographical essays" into memoirs, so she called around and spoke to some other authors for help. In the end, she took the title of each of her essays and added "chapter X" to each of them. Clever!

So the reading was kinda dull. Afterwards, at the House of Dodd, Hall was the belle of the ball, still charmingly toothless, warmly engaging everyone including the Underminer but especially a Pretentious Literary Douchebag chatting her up. The Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple split up and floated around. They shared a Disgustingly Self-Absorbed glass of white wine, passing it off when their paths crossed. All in all, this soiree was much more fun than expected, except for one glaring omission.

Normally, if Erica Hateley is at an event, all the poorly-dressed slackers have a leader to inspire them. But her absence left the slackers feeling empty, adrift, and pathetic. When the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple stepped out for a smoke with its Underminer, Emily Kennedy stepped up to the plate to lead us.

It turns out that Emily is just as awesome as Erica, except no quirky accent. Except! She also does a pretty good Saucy Aussie impression. "I’m not down with the vag," Erica once told Emily, "but if I were," blah blah blah (we were still processing the confirmation of Erica not being down with the vag so we didn’t hear anything after that, but we know we want to hear Emily do Erica’s accent some more). It was great! Now the slackers have a new punk-rock-girl crush, and Erica has her very own underminer!

After that the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple left to go see the Laramie Project. The Underminer left too, not only so she could go see the Laramie Project but also because she needed to broadcast some more underminerey sweeping generalizations.

This scene was unseemingly heartwarming, which NEVER happens. Elizabeth Dodd, Karin Westman, and Meredith Hall are all talking as though they are actually BFFs. Also, Tanya’s husband lurked around and Kim Baltrip sat back in the foyer. Dr. Westman has this way of craning her neck and tilting her head when she’s listening to someone, and she did just that with Hall. It was cute! The Hour Badly Spent was deeply moved.

So there was this Visiting Writer thingie on Friday, and lo, it appeared in the local rag with a few copyediting inaccuracies, but there it is.

What struck me at Sugi Ganeshananthan’s reading was that, although the story was not particularly suspenseful, everyone in the audience was on the edge of their seats, quiet as housecats. I sat at the back of the room so I could pass notes to the well-dressed and cutely accessorized Hipster Elf, and the only thing that came to mind is ’someone should belch.’

I wrote that down and showed her — I had to be very careful because with no one else fidgeting in their seats and checking the clock I couldn’t just conceal my own fidgeting in the general shuffle. After that I decided to just sit back and listen.

Sugi’s prose was clear and brief, expressing feeling beautifully without making us wade through overbearing complexity. After the reading, someone asked her about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

"It’s nice to be in a place where you can say ‘I’m a writer’ and not have people ask you ‘what have you written that I might have read?’"

I mouse-ishly tried to get the commentariat’s reaction.

"You can interview me," said Tanya Gonzalez, bouncing down the hall on her way out. "It was fabulous!"

I guess that says it all.

Since I was trying to commit as many journalistic ethical violations as possible, I took the Hipster Elf with me to the Cathouse to interview sources. The English department and the Visiting Writer were hanging out, in a circle, by the window.

I sat around, trying to overhear and sift through ambient conversation; Saucy Aussie, with her typical aussome, made a boo-boo and dug around in her bag for a bandage (she apparently carries around a first-aid kit everywhere? And weeps at the sight of her own blood); Sean discussed something lofty and English-ey with the Visiting Writer; Jen was being an exceptionally charming and cogent drunk.

"The way that she [Sugi] played with the theme of hurt reminded me of Midnight’s Children," she said. That was the second time in as many days an English major recommended that book to me. Everything is foreshadowing.

I also spoke to the Visiting Writer herself, which felt weird strange because she’s a real journalist and I’m, well, me. And besides the tender, intimate prose, "Love Marriage" — which I have not read — apparently has something important to say about the play of good and evil in a post-9/11 world.

"There is an idea of who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad,’ but the truth is not always obvious," Sugi said. "There are so many different ways to be wrong and so many different ways to be right. The people who probably think of themselves as good, with a slight turn of their lives — maybe five degrees west, could probably be bad." And with that, the conflict between human and Cylon takes another angle. Nerd.

Anyway. Read "Love Marriage." Go ahead and buy it and then I’ll borrow it from you.

[K-State Collegian]

Seriously. I saw her outside Stuni and I’m like "DOCTOR Hateley!" All excited, you know. And she goes "That’s one of the nicer things you’ve said about me."  Touché!

So. Just to set the record straight; she is not the pompous funny-sounding cavewoman I have made her out to be. I personally like this woman. Being around her is pure joy; she is, in fact, good-humored, quick-witted, lively, humble, gracious, she’s got oodles of education and class, and, frankly, she’s kinda cute. But the best thing she’s got going for her is that since she’s spent so much time in Kansas you don’t even have to call her Australian any more! Yay! Glad I could be of service. I’ll be here til around ten if you need anything else cleared up.

Sorry for being out of touch! My intertubez connection has been kind of wobbly, which has seriously impeded my otherwise steady accumulation of BBW porn (don’t judge me). Also, I’ve been trying to avoid my stalkerey ex. Yeah, I’ve got one of those. And not in the sense of "an enthusiastic follower who just likes me a lot," which is what people in Kansas think a stalker is; no, it’s more like "someone who’s intrusive and crazy and a little bit destructive," which trust me, is soooo much more exciting than the Kansas kind.

Good times, good times. So I’ve been spending my time temping in swank Santa Monica offices as well as furiously groping around for more school money. What’s going on with you guys? Grey Lady? Sexy Communist Spy? Princess Glitter Bunny? Atomic Fireball Candy? Saucy Aussie? Poetess? Sitemeter tells me you all still check in here once in a while (thanks!).

In addition to the money thing and the temping, my friend MiniMii celebrated my return to Los Angeles by taking me to the Wild Goose and springing for my first lap dance ever (don’t click there). And OF COURSE I was gonna write an awesomely cogent blog post about it, transitioning from the viewing of nipples to some revelatory insight on the true nature of man-woman relations, but I got drunk and couldn’t really come up with anything to say about it, except "tits!" which really sums up everything in the world with wit and precision.

Technorati Profile (Don’t click there).

The Poetess recently gave voice to the existential horror of attending an informal gathering of English professors: "I’m not smart enough."

Well, yes you are, and that’s really no big deal. English professors are just like the rest of us. Nobody comes to a party to be outsmarted. They just want you to listen to them, get their jokes, seek explanations for what you don’t understand, and squeeze their asses when no one else is looking (Professor Dodd will use colourful pants to indicate her receptivity. But do not try this with the Saucy Aussie. I saw her first!).

Your best strategy is to figure out what everybody thinks of everybody else, which you can use for leverage when you ascend to the top of a multinational crime syndicate. This exercise is all about self-effacement. You are not here to show off your resplendent panoply of grace and charm. And if you have enough grace and charm to impress the English professors then I hate you already.

So don’t name-drop, like I did with Princess Glitter Bunny ("Oh of course I know what you’re talking about. Unlike the other undergrads, I’ve read Derrida! Har har har!") That’s just wankerish. Rather, just ask questions. Find an old man, with a bow tie and bushy eyebrows, who is already drunk. He is the best place to start. He is a font of experience, good humor, and as a bonus, he is actually kind of awesome. Ask about what he’s written, what he likes to read — Milton, apparently — where he’s travelled, etc. Let him do the work. He’s just itching to unload some jovial backstabbey nugget about one of his peers. Just wait. I promise it will be funny. You should also probably try to make yourself as drunk as he is.

Do not sit next to Rhymes With Flan. You did not dress well enough for that, and this fact will gnaw at you every second you are there. She is tall, slender, blonde, stylish, and her diction is flawless. If she were your age, she’d be a wholesome sorority frenemy. You, by contrast, mumble and stutter (which is partly why you’re listening and not talking); your sartorial contribution is a wrinkled green docent shirt your ex gave you seven years ago. You wore it today because you really don’t have a windbreaker, but next to Rhymes With Flan, you look like you’re homeless.

Eventually, something underminerey like this will happen:

The Hour Badly Spent:  Do you mind if I smoke?
Rhymes With Flan:       Oh. Please, don’t. Ew [shudders].
The Hour Badly Spent:  Oh, okay.
Rhymes With Flan:       Yech.

You’ll see the Perverted Shakespeare Professor. In class, he’s so upbeat, almost cheerleaderey; this evening, long after class, he might seem somehow jaded and weary. We suspect the production of ‘Tis Pitty Shee’s A Whore must have been stressful, what with all the preparations being made during those weeks after spring break where everybody goes through a ceaseless gauntlet of exams and term papers and projects. That is why the cast only met for their first full rehearsal a day before curtain time.

I don’t know shit about Jacobean drama. Or any type of drama, for that matter. But I’ll talk about it anyway. The performance — Saturday night, wish you were there! — was fun and celebratory, and slightly campy; just like the Professor conducts his classes, except with slightly more incest. My favorite actor was the Roman soldier: his uniform was a polo shirt with some pinned-on medals.

You might hear about studentfucking. Kind of interesting, but it’s really to be expected, and it’s only juicy if you actually know either of the parties involved, which you don’t, because you don’t know anybody, which is why you’re drinking with English professors on Thursday night and the following Friday afternoon. So put the hearsay out of your mind, because (A) you don’t want to get anyone fired, and (B) you’re not an earnest do-goodey cockblocker. Also: don’t shout out "studentfucker!" in the middle of a lecture (Sorry about that! It was noisy! How was I supposed to know the dean would hear me?).

You might also hear of dumb stuff the students have said — about ethnic minorities and such. It won’t be so bad. All the real wingnuts either go into engineering or polisci. Don’t worry about who, exactly, said what; there’s a good chance you’ll find out soon enough who this person is, based on your ability to stereotype better than she can (a gender neutral pronoun would be really nice right about now!). She will get a column in the Collegian. She will bring guns to class. She will run for student government. She will meet a soldier who will love her for her "values," and they will marry young and have lots of little douchebags, who will attend K-State.

You, however, will not find love. You will find rum, which is just a different kind of love.

Speaking of which, in time, the Most Annoying English-Major Couple will make an appearance. They really are cute together. They will sit next to each other, of course; bemusedly chatting about their plans for the future. They will lightly stroke each others’ arms, but not excessively; they will smile at each others’ literary puns, but not excessively; and one of them will drink. Excessively. And that is the real secret to shmoozing with people who have more intelligence, class, and wit than you.

Over Xmas break I worked for this lady — a professional screenwriter — doing odd errands for her and getting no pay in return, a relationship known as an "internship." I thought it might be nice to get the experience of being around an experienced writer blah blah blah, but the more she talked — and she loved to namedrop — the more I realized she was a self-centered drama queen. This weekend I got a Facebook message from her. Things like this make me avoid Facebook.

1. I took A DAY (OMG!) to respond because (A) I had shit to do, and (B) I didn’t feel like resolving a 40-ish-year-old woman’s ‘crisis.’ Since she’s messaging me on Facebook, she must have seen my status update: "I just don’t give a shit." I really don’t.
2. "Negro?" I know we’re both black and therefore we have that unspoken camaraderie that enables us a certain familiarity. Nonetheless, not even my own mother talks to me that way, and you don’t know me like that.

The reason I addressed her like that is because when a boss is acting like a childish wanker (did I use it right that time?), said boss should have his or her twittery vomited back with a clear explanation as to why it’s coming. As a bonus, I like to throw in a middle finger.

And I wasn’t kidding about the apartment thing. She called me one Sunday afternoon, from Los Angeles, while I’m in Manhattan Kansas — which she knew — and told me she wanted me to find her an apartment by Monday morning. The reason? She had a psycho roommate (her 2nd or 3rd this year — I don’t bother keeping track) and COULDN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE and somehow this was suddenly my problem too.

Part of being a grown-up is learning how to negotiate with the people around you, instead of throwing a shitfit when someone takes a sip of your orange juice or smokes your weed. Right?

See? We’re getting her GOOD SIDE here. Don’t you feel lucky? In her defense, she really did endure a severe personal tragedy last year. Which had absolutely nothing to do with me.

It’s tangential, but this conversation reminds me of an episode of Blind Date I saw years ago. A guy from New York was on with a girl from a small Texas town. The texan was superhot, not a ditz, and she seemed to be putting some effort into the outing. The New York asshat wasn’t having any of it. The whole time, he was all "It’s just that you’re from this small town, where everyone’s so narrow-minded. I’m from New York, where there’s so much going on, so many people from so many different cultures, and it’s really broadened my horizons. Blah blah blah blah, New York is soooo great but your podunk town sucks, ipso facto, you suck and always will." The irony was not lost on the Texan, who kept going "Well, what do you mean? How can I make this date better?"

Of course he couldn’t say what he meant, so I will. "Broadening horizons" doesn’t actually give you a deeper understanding of other people; it just makes you more condescending toward them. In New York, you don’t mix with other cultures. You mix with New York culture. So here’s the question: what is it, exactly, about the Big Apple, that brings out the douchiest in people? That is, of course, rhetorical; I don’t give a shit.

The Poetess tries to peek at my diary journal every time I’m out with her. Thursday night I finally just said what the fuck and handed it over for inspection.

"I won’t judge you for anything I find in here." Not that it’s human nature or anything.

So, as she paged through, I felt the nerves and vessels under my skin getting all twisty. I drummed my fingers on the table. I fidgeted with my beard. I wiggled my leg up and down, insanely fast, like a meth-addled hummingbird. I noticed she was lingering on one page.

"Find something interesting?"

"It’s kind of sad."

The passage under scrutiny: I’m an optical illusion. That’s my secret. Look away and I disappear. Turn off the light and I don’t exist.

Breaking: when no one’s looking, I write reams of angsty, self-indulgent prattle. I’ve also apparently jotted down fragments of Pablo Neruda poetry. And that is definitely the worst of it what was in there (the prattle, not the Pablo). No sordid PILF fantasies (none that I’ve written down, anyway). No shocking gossip. No chronicling private embarrassing habits (I masturbate. A LOT). Am I really so dull that I have nothing to hide? Apparently so.

Therefore, the next night, chain-smoking at a party with Ariana and the usual frenemies, when Limitless Are Leaves asked about taking a peek through the big black book of secrets, I had no objection. And when Brandon, too, wanted to see it, I didn’t mind, although he did sort of seem like he was actually studying it and not just surfing pages.

The party room was so full of Swear Not By The Moon’s laughter that it spilled out through the windows and into the parking lot where the smokers were hanging out. Did she do coke again? No, she’s just always like that. Maybe she’s always high on coke.

I honestly think she is always high. Coke — so I hear, mind you — makes you feel hyper and really important, a perfect party drug. Swear Not By The Moon is a party girl. She’s got the look: annoyingly thin and blonde. She is sometimes fun but she also kind of sneers at you when you talk to her. She powerless to curb her ways. Because of the drugs, you see. Although I’m probably just mad because she never offers me any.

I and Limitless Are Leaves really only came to drink, not to party, so we sort of kept to ourselves and our vodka and let the cool kids do their thing (which, again, may or may not have been coke). It’s a good thing I was really drunk. It’s the only way to deal with certain situations and certain people. Or in my case, all situations and all people. It also somewhat explains why she and I ended up making out on the floor.

In my crackpot bid to merge my soul with the id of the English department, I started documenting the heroic exploits of the department’s all-stars in a faux tabloidish style on this blog. To my surprise, my wildly inaccurate portrayals of their wit, as well as the gratuitous vagina jokes, have been found and re-googled by some of their subjects (Here’s the drum: whenever you visit The Hour Badly Spent, my site metrics page shows me what search terms you used to find me).

The Saucy Aussie insists - in a funny accent, of course - that I’m upping her street cred, because in truth she is extremely prim and proper, not "tart as a nipple-shaped jawbreaker," as I may have suggested in various bathroom-stall etchings throughout town. Nevertheless, I can’t help but imagine that these hyper-literate googlers get together and peek at the screen over each others’ shoulders and do to my blog exactly what I do to the Collegian - scoff with derisive indignation (No fair! You guys know I can dish it out but I can’t take it), except the bonza English professors probably do it better than me because they use words like trope and metatextual, and I’m deadcert Anne Longmuir likes to make obnoxious literary puns and everyone else has to awkwardly play along like they get the reference.

Anyway, just saying, if you’re going to squiz me regularly, it might be prudent to bookmark The Hour Badly Spent or add it to your RSS reader. That way I won’t see the Google searches on my site metrics page and won’t know it’s you. If, however, you would like for me to know for sure that you’ve been by, feel free to comment the living shit out of this beehotch. Ideally, your responses would consist of:

• backhanded remarks about my personal hygiene.
• wild exaggerations of my sexual prowess.
• well-deserved umbrage whenever I post something stridently offensive or wrong or unfunny or off-limits or just plain too prolix. Fair dinkum?
• witty and pretentious English-majorey jokes as they relate to the post at hand. Because I, too, would like to dust off my L’écriture et la Différence and undo the chain of logocentric binary oppositions that characterize Western thought, but I can’t do it alone. It’s really hard.

Yesterday Anthony Doerr visited K-State and read a short story from his latest book, The Shell Collector. That reading was the best K-State’s had this year. Afterward, the English department got together at Rock-A Belly’s. I was midway through my second G&T when the Saucy Aussie made some idle comment that ended with "vagina." I remember precisely what she sad: "Crikey! Kangaroo Kylie Minogue sheila dingo boomerang bushwhacked VAGINA!" The table went silent for a second, and Saucy Aussie seemed embarrassed, probably because she thought she had crossed some comfort line.

Well, that’s not why we were quiet. The word "vagina" is actually a great source of comfort. Hearing it is like having a cool breeze roll across you on a summer day. No; we went silent because each of us had hoped to be the first to say "vagina" that evening, and when she beat us to the (kitty) punch, no one was ready with another clever vaginal follow-up. Personally, her awesomeness made me feel like a slow-witted prude.

I lamely tried to break the silence. "Thanks! I’ve been waiting for someone to say ‘vagina’ all day," I ejaculated. But ‘vagina’ doesn’t roll off my tongue as nicely as it does from hers. OR DOES IT?

After dinner, Rhymes With Visa drove a few of us - Imad, Tony Doerr, Saucy Aussie - to the top of the hill that overlooks the city. We had to get out and hike a little ways to reach the summit, from which we had a beautiful view of Best Buy. Then Rhymes With Visa drove us back to town. Not til much later did I realize how pathetically funny the whole scene actually was: we were basically all guided up to the top of Makeout friggin’ Mountain, and yet it never occurred to anybody to cop a feel. Lame.

Vagina! There; our reputations are safe.